Whereas splatter movies wield gore and carnage like a weapon to evoke a visceral response, splatter comedies push the onscreen violence and gore into outlandish territory for the sake of a hearty laugh. Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi, for example, began their filmmaking careers defining the modern splatter comedy with their early works, pushing the boundaries of taste, horror, and humor through cartoonish bloodletting.
This week brings the arrival of a new splatter-comedy, Destroy All Neighbors, presenting the perfect excuse to laugh your way through the excess entrails and arterial spray the niche subgenre has to offer. These five splatter comedies vary in style and tone, but all seek to tickle your funny bone through humor, fun, and a whole lot of guts.
Here’s where you can stream them this week.
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
Blood Diner – The Roku Channel
Before becoming a standalone film, Blood Diner was initially intended to act as a sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast. That change resulted in a zany ’80s horror-comedy that remakes the splatter classic; the premise is essentially the same at its core. Directed by Jackie Kong, Blood Diner follows two brothers tasked by their dead serial killer uncle to continue his attempts to resurrect the goddess Sheetar. They do this by using their diner to host ritualistic feasts and lure women from which they harvest body parts, but the brothers’ vapid nature winds up making this feel like Bill & Ted were unwittingly dropped into a horror-comedy. Their murder spree is made all the funnier when detectives are stumped by the crime scenes. The original played it straight, while Kong dials up the ’80s excess here for maximum gonzo laughs.
Feast – Plex, The Roku Channel, Tubi
Feast presents an “anything goes,” crass and raunchy attitude that doesn’t take itself too seriously right out of the gate. Except when it comes to the gore. Directed by John Gulager and written by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan, Feast assembles an eclectic bunch at a roadside bar then traps them there as deadly monsters descend. Characters get introduced via humorous archetype cards before quickly being dispatched in goopy, bloody ways. Gulager delivers a gruesomely over-the-top creature feature with its tongue firmly in cheek but with a breakneck speed and emphasis on practical effects and action.
Re-Animator – AMC+, Arrow, Fandor, Kanopy, Midnight Pulp, Plex, SCREAMBOX, Shudder, Tubi
This loose retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West-Reanimator goes for the jugular in terms of gore and laughs thanks to director Stuart Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna, and actor Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West. West’s creation of a reanimating agent brings dead tissue back to life, which proves disastrous for roommate Dan (Bruce Abbott), his girlfriend Megan (Barbara Crampton), and the higher-ranking administration of Miskatonic University. It’s Combs and his quirky character that provides most of the laughs in this blood-drenched feature, but so too does the film’s villain- the horny severed head of Dr. Carl Hill. If you’ve seen this a dozen times already, consider revisiting as a double feature with Suitable Flesh when it arrives on Shudder later this month.
Street Trash – AMC+, Night Flight, Tubi
Set in a Brooklyn junkyard with a cast of characters comprised mostly of homeless people, the film follows their wacky adventures made even wackier when a local liquor store owner starts selling them Tenafly Viper, 60-year-old hooch that’s gone bad and melts any drinkers from the inside out. Street Trash takes the gory practical effects of the decade further by making the blood dayglo colors, a vibrant signal not to take this splatter movie seriously, even when testing the boundaries of humor and taste. If you need an extra incentive to hit play on this one, a reboot is on the way!
Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead – Fandor, Midnight Pulp, SCREAMBOX
The title says it all. Expect more splatstick mayhem from Noboru Iguchi (Dead Sushi, Machine Girl, RoboGeisha) here. A group trip goes awry when teen Maki devours a fish with a parasitic worm; it sparks an undead invasion like no other. Poop-covered undead, potent farts, and more are promised in this over-the-top gross-out horror comedy. Splatter comedies often test your gag reflex through unrelenting gore gags, played up to comedic perfection. Noboru Iguchi escalates the carnage with the repulsive inclusion of, well, Zombie Ass.
The post Stay Home, Watch Horror: Five Splatter Comedies to Stream This Week appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.